Fantasy Book Critic is pleased to welcome Jeffrey Bardwell to our blog today as a
special guest blogger. Jeffrey is the author of the soon-to-be released book Broken
Wizards. Broken Wizards is the first novel in The Artifice Mage Saga. It is scheduled to be released April 15,
2017.

Summary for Broken Wizards:

Time's up for
mages!

The wizard purge is in
full swing. Sorcery is illegal in the modern, steam-powered Iron Empire. The
Magistrate's Black Guards hunt the uncivilized mages using mechanized armor and
mysterious, clockwork weapons. The guards deliver their prisoners to the
Butcher, Captain Vice. All wizards are tortured and executed as traitors to the
state . . . with one exception.

That exception is
Devin, an outbreak mage and ex artificer, a prince of machinery. The Magistrate
exiles the youth over Vice's protests to the wild kingdom of wizards and
dragons. Devin only knows gears and springs, but his savage magic offers
salvation, if he can tame it. The exile must learn to harness his dangerous,
new powers before the Butcher tracks him down to finish the job.

Follow Devin's quest
in Book One of The Artifice Mage Saga. Join the fantasy steampunk brawl of
metal vs. magic where sorcery is bloody, science is greasy, and nobody's hands
are clean.

To celebrate the release of his book, Jeff has stopped by to
talk about magic, life and the God complex. Welcome him to the blog!

Easter
is approaching and with it the annual celebration of the most famous
instance of rebirth. Whether you believe in the literal resurrection
of Christ, the story resonates because society is
captivated with the archetype of instilling life in the dead or the
inanimate, a
need for which fantasy has the answer: magic.
Authors
have cloaked
these powers in many different guises: lightning
(Mary Shelly), magic powder (Frank L. Baum), a
wish upon star (Carlo Collodi), prophecy (C. S. Lewis), or
intercession of the gods
(J. R. R. Tolkein) all
restore or create life force. Whether
acknowledged directly or not, such power has a whiff of the divine.

What
effect does this
magic have on the magician himself? For, in some
dark,
literary irony, the
magician who
creates life
is always male. Surely, women have no place in tales of birth? Or
perhaps the idea was too close to reality for fantasy? No, we have a
man, a young man(typically
a virgin), who wields this awesome power.

I
draw a distinction now between reanimating the dead and reanimating
the lifeless. In the examples above, there are only two instances
where life was gifted to that which was never sentient in the first
place and both stories involve wooden simulacra: The
Marvelous Land of Ozwith
Jack Pumpkinhead and
the
eponymousPinocchio.
This invokes even more of a god complex than before! We are not
simply reanimating dead tissue, we are building a person from scratch
(albeit not from the clay or mud of the creation mythos) or metal
(let's leave robotics to science fiction), but wood. Granted,
unlike
mud or metal, that wood
was once alive until
we chopped it into pieces and fashioned it into a crude reflection of
mankind, but it could not think before we magicked it so.

The
Jesus carpenter metaphor is somewhat more blatant in Pinocchio
than Oz
as we have the humble woodworker Mastro Geppetto, who creates a spark
of life in his hand-crafted, wooden son. Does
the creator take responsibility for his wooden progeny? In the case
of Pinocchio,
the desire for a son and the nature of humanity is at the forefront
of the plot, and in Oz
tossed
off as a magic trick, as
the ramifications of tin godhood are usually reserved for the tales
of reanimation, such as Frankenstein.
But
in
a world with devout citizens,
and in the typical medieval second world fantasy, the role of the
typically
polytheistic
faith and its
representatives is paramount, unless
the wizards are also the priests (whoops, I just gave myself an
idea), then creating life would precipitate either a crisis of the
faith or a god complex.

In
my new novel, Broken
Wizards,
I bring together the creation of a wooden son (Pinocchio)
with the existential questions of the responsibilities of godhood
(Frankenstein)
in a world where magic is fairly commonplace (Oz).
My magician is a devout, gods-fearing youth who has discovered he now
wields the power of the five gods themselves. The crisis is easy
enough to rationalize in the moment.

He is not divine, but a mere
agent of the gods. But the rest of it? The youth has just unwittingly
created a son. His incipient fatherhood is a much more real, much
more scary concept than piddly, abstract notions of divinity!

I invite you to discover (perhaps, even enjoy) the rest for yourselves.

About the Author:

Jeffrey
Bardwell is an ecologist with a Ph.D. who loves fantasy, amphibians,
and reptiles. The author devours fantasy and science fiction novels,
is most comfortable basking near a warm wood stove, and has eaten a
bug or two. The author populates his own novels with realistic, fire
breathing lizards. These dragons are affected by the self-inflicted
charred remains of their environment, must contend with the paradox
of allometric scaling, and can actually get eaten themselves.

The
author lives on a farm, is perhaps overfond of puns and
alliterations, and is a gigantic ham. When not in use, he keeps his
degrees skinned and mounted on the back wall of his office. Email at:
jhbardwell@gmail.com

1 comments:

Looks really good! I love a good Wizard!! I am currently reading Sara Pascoe's book Being A Witch and Other Things I Didn't Ask For. It's been fantastic, my daughter and I both enjoyed it!! sarapascoe.net is the author site. Well worth the read.